Social networking is hot and apparently, Hitwise confirms that MySpace is burning up the competition. For every 20 times a person in the US visited a website in September, one of those times the visit was to a ‘social networking’ site.
Social networking sites are online destinations where profiles can be built and users can connect with friends or colleagues, sharing photos, videos, blogs and editing their custom web pages.
Of those social networks, MySpace.com is the most popular, attracting 82% of the visits among the top 20 social networking sites.
MySpace (www.myspace.com) was the undisputed leader in social networking, receiving 82 percent of visits among the top 20 leading social networking websites in September 2006. Visits to MySpace increased by 51 percent from March to September 2006, outpacing category growth in visits of 34 percent. Other social networking websites which received larger than average growth in market share of visits between March and September 2006 were: Bolt (www.bolt.com), up 271 percent; Bebo (www.bebo.com), up 95 percent; Orkut (www.orkut.com), up 63 percent; and Gaia Online (www.gaia.com), up 41 percent.
The influence of MySpace crosses over into other industries as users integrate social networking visits with other web activity. In September 2006, 2.4 percent of visits to Shopping & Classifieds websites came directly from MySpace, an increase of 83 percent since March 2006. Other industries receiving increased traffic from MySpace in that period were Telecommunications, Banks and Financial Institutions, and Travel.
MySpace is quite an influential part of the Internet and may, one day, challenge Yahoo or Microsoft online communities – especially with current International expansion efforts.
Hitwise published a report on their findings along with the popularity of community founded photosharing sites like Flickr and video sharing sites like YouTube.
